Archive for ‘August, 2015’

312 AD. Rhual, a young and athletic Gaul, is invited to take part in the gladiator games at the seaside villa of Senator Fabius Severus, near Rome. Secretly, Rhual is an agent of Emperor Constantine who wishes to establish Christianity in the Roman Empire, and Fabius is leading a movement for religious tolerance and the freeing of slaves. In the villa gardens Rhual meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl whom he later discovers to be Fabiola, the senator's daughter. Fabius is murdered during the night by reactionary politicians opposed to Christianity, and the Christians are blamed for the murder. Fabiola suspects Rhual to be one of the Christian assassins, but at their trial he appears in their defence. However, the Christians together with Rhual are found guilty and sentenced to death in the arena. So begin the persecutions during which many Christians are killed or imprisoned...

Detroit. October 30th. Night. Devil's Night, to be precise. As the city burns around them, several hoodlums rape and mutilate Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas), and throw her boyfriend, Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), out the window to his death. Shelly dies in the hospital 30 hours later.

Detroit. October 30th. One year later. Eric rises from the grave, where he finds that he is now impervious to bullets and cuts. Painting his face in black and white makeup and aided by a crow whose eyes he can see through, he sets about exacting a violent and brutal death to each of the hoods that killed him.

The winner of a Tiger Award in 2007 decided after she moved: I'm just going to make a short film every month. So she did.

The seven short films in this series are very different. It occasionally appears as if the maker is dissatisfied with her training and is reinventing film history for herself. There is a very pure documentary, there are dramatic dialogue-driven films (The Need of Ritual, Everyday, Everyday), dramatic actions (To Say Goodbye) and even burlesque science-fiction films (Dream #1, #2 and #3).

Prepare to trip out with the most outlandish and unintentionally hilarious films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. This three DVD collection of cautionary tales follows the downward spiral of America’s youth as they puff their way through wild parties, jazz music and all the threatening influences of the era! Discover the outrageous insanity lurking around every corner, in this collection of twelve camp classics from the golden age of sinister cinema!

The "vice and virtue" of the title of this wartime drama directed by Roger Vadim are exemplified in the personae of two very attractive women: Juliette (Annie Girardot) and Justine (Catherine Deneuve). Juliette is a collaborator and Justine supports the resistance movement, yet when her husband is arrested on her wedding day, she goes to Juliette to ask for help. That simple plan is nixed by a series of unfortunate circumstances that send Justine to a brothel for German soldiers and make Juliette the mistress of a brutal Nazi officer.
The symbolism in this tale harks back to two stories by the Marquis de Sade, one titled "Juliette" and the other, "Justine". Vadim seems to have been caught between creating symbolic characters versus creating believable women since as the story unfolds, Juliette is not exactly vice incarnate, nor is Justine a model of pristine virtue.

Claude is uncertain. He is a young bourgeois man with a number of accomplishments, but his life has reached an impasse. He begins to question the choices he's made and life's possibilities. Everything is under critical scrutiny: his family, his relationships, whether or not to become a father with his Haitian girlfriend, and most importantly, what to decide about his sexual orientation. Structured loosely as Claude's own personal confessions and filled with allusions to jazz, poetry and French New Wave cinema, A tout prendre offers up Claude's experience as symptomatic of the concerns, intellectual and otherwise, of the first post-Quiet Revolution generation of the 1960s. It is a generation that is restless, impatient, energetic, and about to assume economic and political control.

Of Louis Malle’s early films, Zazie dans le metro is the most emblematic of the French New Wave and arguably the director's most influential film. Released in 1960, Malle’s third film constantly calls attention to its technique, even having a character ponder the film's place in the New Wave at one point.
Based upon veteran surrealist Raymond Queneau’s 1959 novel, Zazie dans le metro follows ten-year-old Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) during a visit to Paris. While her mother (Odette Piquet) is busy cavorting with her latest boyfriend, Zazie stays with her female impersonator uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret). Zazie's only interest in the City of Lights is to ride the subway, but the Metro is closed due to a strike. Thwarted in her ambitions, the young girl quickly escapes the not-so-watchful eye of her uncle and embarks on a madcap tour of 1960s Paris. Zazie's hyperactive imagination intersects reality at various odd angles, resulting in a slew of absurd scenarios that include a cartoonish chase across the rooftops, acrobatic stunts on the Eiffel Tower, and an explosive sauerkraut fight finale.

Texas Ranger captain Tom King (Monte Blue) is murdered just as he’s on the verge of smashing a sabotage ring that’s been operating in Texas and Mexico – but his son, college football star Tom King Jr. (Sammy Baugh), picks up where his father left off, taking on the slain Ranger’s badge and his important assignment. With the help of Mexican Rurales officer Pedro Garcia and small-town newspaper editress Sally Crane (Pauline Moore), the new Ranger quickly begins to hamper the sabotage ring’s operations; King and his allies are unaware, however, that upright rancher and oil-company stockholder John Barton (Neil Hamilton) is the leader of the saboteurs – or that Barton’s backer, a high-ranking foreign military officer (Rudolph Anders), is overseeing the sabotage activities from a lurking zeppelin high above Texas.

The Sex Ed or "marriage manual" film is one of the most significant genres in the history of American adult cinema. As peculiar as it may sound in an age of virtually limitless smut, it was not too many decades ago that explicit representations of sexual activity were considered both morally and legally indefensible, a pure manifestation of that constitutional bugbear known as obscenity. Even though soft-core sex-exploitation films had been gradually pushing the envelope during the 1960s, the notion – even among producers of such films – that real-life sex would one day find its way onto American movie screens would have seemed like sheer science fiction right up to the end of the sexploitation era. Although illegal stag films depicting hardcore sex had been around since at least the 1920s, the convergence of publicly exhibited, 35 mm features with the illicit pleasures of a private Elk’s lodge smoker was a cultural and legal development few would have anticipated.

George Rivero stars in Fist Fighter as C.J. Thunderbird, a participant in the dangerous, illegal world of bare-knuckle boxing. He has arrived in Santiago to find Rhino, (Matthias Huse) who killed his best friend in an underground fist fighting-match two years ago. Now he wants to fight Rhino and avenge his friend. He meets Punchy, (Edward Albert) who is an ex-boxer. Although he's invalid, he want's to help CJ get in shape for the fight with Rhino.
Then things don't work out the way their were supposed to...